Digital channels are making things harder at utility call centers

Electric utilities are pushing customers to digital channels to handle easy transactions, paying bills and checking outage status. And that trend is making call center interactions more complex.

Utibe Bassey, the vice president of customer experience at Dominion Energy, said in an interview on the With Great Power podcast that call centers have evolved in recent years, both in response to macro-economic factors like inflation and energy costs, as well as digitalization.

“As we move more transactions to the digital channels…the nature of the remaining calls becomes much more complex,” she said. “We’re seeing the mix of calls change, and so from the easier transactional ones we are now left with more complex calls that take longer.”

That increasing complexity impacts call center performance metrics, such as customer satisfaction and the average speed of answer, or ASA, calculated by dividing the total amount of time customers spend waiting in the call queue by the total number of calls answered. Bassey said her team has had to reevaluate the call center’s ASA metrics because of the increasing complexity. Another complicating factor, though, is that ever since the COVID-19 pandemic there has been a shortage of call center workers, forcing reps to take on a higher volume of calls.

“The contact center job has historically been an on-premise job,” she said, but during COVID it became fully remote, which meant that many people found other jobs. “In the past few years, we’ve seen a shortage of folks in [call center] roles.”

The arrival of more digital channels is a double-edged sword. While they drive customers to the call centers for more complex issues, they also reduce the volume of calls. But Bassey hopes to leverage some of the digital channels for handling more complex customer interactions as well.

For instance, with the rise of new programs and services enabled by smart meters and dynamic rates, bills are becoming more complex and creating more confusion with customers.

Recently, Bassey’s team revamped the electronic billing system to ease some of the pressure on the call centers and resolve more complex billing issues online, with an eye toward making it “a lot more comprehensive and user friendly,” she said.

“The more complex that the inputs are, the more complex the process can be,” said Bassey. “So we are looking at how technology can help streamline some of those things,” she added.

But the digital channels will never completely displace the need for call centers, she added.

“You always have to be able to answer the phone within a certain amount of time,” she said. “You always have to be empathetic and listen.”

For the full conversation with Utibe Bassey on the utility customer experience, listen to her interview on season 3 of With Great Power. With Great Power is a show about the people building the future grid, today. It’s a co-production of GridX and Latitude Studios. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get your shows.

Read Latitude Media’s original article here.